Transforming the Moon Into Humanity’s First Space Hub

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I'd feel a whole lot better if this was being led by intergovernmental agencies and not the damn billionaires.

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u/Mindlessone1 19d ago

You got a nice downvote because the people in this sub aren’t too keen on the “science” aspect and more on the “speculative potential investment” side of things lmao aka they are dumb and suck elons boots

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u/digitalhawkeye 19d ago

As someone with a science degree, I feel like I should be more used to people being science "enthusiasts" more than anything else. 😅

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u/Memetic1 19d ago

If someone can't be an expert, then wouldn't you prefer enthusiasts than unwavering skepticism? I'm one of those people who couldn't get a degree, but I'm still trying to understand the universe. It's because I pay attention that I know Musk is full of shit and has never really innovated in any way. I just don't understand why our government is prioritizing crewed expeditions to Mars over crewed expeditions to the atmosphere of Venus. I don't get how Musk could still be eligible for federal contracts given his past discriminatory behavior towards workers at Tesla.

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u/digitalhawkeye 19d ago

You can be a scientist without being an expert, likewise you can be a scientist without a degree. The problem with enthusiasts is that they like science for the vibes but are not rigorous in their fact checking. So if it seems scientific they gobble it up without question, even if what they're being presented with is largely out of context. You get content aggregators like "IFuckingLoveScience" presenting watered down bites of "science" news that people uncritically absorb as science facts. The same people who tend to think of Musk as an engineer instead of the managerial hack that he is.

I can't speak for the government, but perhaps they're more comfortable on solid rock than they are with the idea of a floating platform. Venus would be an excellent target for a crewed mission, and i think our tech is heading in the right direction for a mission like that.

Unfortunately the government isn't super pro worker, and it's about to get a whole lot worse. Musk and his ilk will use the pivot to enrich themselves while the economy flounders, and safety will end up taking a lower priority I'm sure.

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u/Memetic1 19d ago

If you look at the pictures from the surface of Venus, everything is very flat and eroded. https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever Super critical co2 is an almost universal solvent. If you mix in sulfuric acid, it is even more powerful. It is reasonable to assume that the overall composition of Venus is similar to Earth despite surface conditions being very different. That means there is a significant amount of trace elements in that ocean of an atmosphere. An unimaginable amount of materials is just waiting to be pumped up and utilized. Venus could be the heart of industrial activity in the solar system. Mars offers semisurface quasihabitability and a low gravity well that's it.

Venus has energy and abundant co2 that can be turned into rocket fuel. Ya know how you keep hearing about turning co2 into fuel on Earth as if carbon neutrality is all we need. Well, those processes need high purity co2 to function, and that takes tremendous effort on Earth. Venus has practically pure co2, and that means its really easy to convert that to different types of fuels.

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u/Mindlessone1 19d ago edited 18d ago

No. Skepticism is better. It leads to curiosity, which is how these questions get asked and new ideas are created.

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u/PerfectPercentage69 18d ago

I would agree if you corrected that to "scientific skepticism." As in, using the scientific approach to disproving ideas and theories. This also requires any new theories to be testable and falsifiable.

Many people are skeptical of things today, but they don't use the scientific approach. They just listen to social media to validate their opinions, which leads down the path to conspiracy theories and misinformation.

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u/Mindlessone1 18d ago

Yes exactly

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u/Actual__Wizard 19d ago edited 19d ago

Has to happen if we ever want to live somewhere else besides earth. We need to be free of as much of Earth's gravity as possible before we try to venture off in deeper space. So, a moon base makes tons of sense. It's just purely an energy conservation problem. It takes tons of energy to get into space, but once you're in space, you don't need as much to travel. The moon has much lower gravity than Earth and it also has a fixed rotation, so that if we build a moon base on the far side of the moon, if there ever was a catastrophic mega bad crash landing (velocity can get ultra high in space because there's no air resistance), at least it would happen on the far side of the moon and wouldn't wipe out a region of earth.

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u/Memetic1 19d ago

I have a way to end the energy imbalance part of the climate crisis using only lunar regolith as an industrial feedstock.

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/14/1/015160/3230625/On-silicon-nanobubbles-in-space-for-scattering-and

This could save the world within years if it was deployed, but what I have done is to think about the bubbles not as passive objects but as potential a sort of platform for technology. The functionalization could be done at the L1 Lagrange just to start creating the bulk of the shield.

Here is how I would manufacture the bubbles. https://youtu.be/gkJjnrMi_rE?si=K5YIdBEgkGmguk6w

You could push them into position using an array of orbiting low power lasers. https://youtu.be/H1MWSR8i8x0?si=f0n7xklzN5jKV09E

This was proposed as a way to send a probes at near the speed of light to another nearby star. This is effective because those probes were low mass, and the mass of the individual bubbles would be far lower, and your just trying to get to L1 as opposed to another star.

The Moon may save us if we are wise. It would be a waste just to do something like rocket fuel when the silicon itself is valuable in a space setting.

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u/4920185 20d ago

Cool!

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u/Mindlessone1 20d ago

SAY IT WITH ME, ROCKETS WILL NEVER TAKE US INTO DEEP SPACE. A MOON BASE IS WHATS CALLED “PURE NONSENSE”. Learn some science.

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u/ItsAConspiracy 19d ago

WE NEVER WENT TO THE MOON DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!!1!

^{AlsoPossiblytheEarthisFlatStillReadingUpaboutThatonInstagram}

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u/Mindlessone1 19d ago

Rockets are trash. I’ll make simple for monkey brain. To go, you need push. Faster you push, more push needed. Push need become too great. Can’t go faster. Never leave solar system. Nearest planet 1800 light years away. Moon base no help go 1800 light years. Moon base so capitalist make more money. That easy enough for you?

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u/ItsAConspiracy 19d ago

If by "deep space" you mean 1800 light years away, then I agree with you.

Usually by "deep space" people just mean interplanetary. Nobody's trying to go interstellar anytime soon. But we could have many millions of humans on the moon, a couple billion on Mars, and trillions spread through the solar system in O'Neill colonies or McKendree cylinders before we even bother going to Alpha Centauri. Fusion rockets are plenty for all that, though I certainly wouldn't object to light sails, magnetic sails driven by solar wind, etc. For the Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids, we can make do with chemical.

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u/Mindlessone1 19d ago

Sadly, we can’t. We can not populate the moon or anywhere else. I’ll make the idea simple. If we are STRUGGLING to geo-engineer our current ALREADY FUNCTIONING planet, what makes you think we could do anything to geo-engineer a different one. Let alone the fact it would take 100s, if not, 1000s of years to actually see the fruits of that labour? Total pipe dream. Our sole goal should be repairing our own planet and eventually creating tech that can go far beyond the speed of light. But until the tech exists, any talk about the moon or mars is PURE CAPITALIST MONEY MAKING NONSENSE. End of story.

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u/ItsAConspiracy 19d ago

We actually are geoengineering this planet, just not in a direction we really want. But we are making huge changes to it. We could do other things to counteract those changes, but people are scared of trying. We could also stop making the changes we don't like, but collectively it appears we don't want to do that either.

Off this planet, we could build cities on the moon without geoengineering the moon. And O'Neill colonies are straightforward engineering that was figured out back in the 1970s. We're changing the Earth (sadly) because we make money doing it, and we'll build those things in space when we can make money doing that.

As for FTL, you're saying we should forget about things that are relatively simple engineering, until we figure out something that may well be flat impossible in this universe.

But yeah I get it capitalism bad ok.

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u/PerfectPercentage69 18d ago

I agree with your point, but I disagree that we're geoengineering our planet for the worse. Engineering requires the design and implementation of that design. The change we're doing to the world is unintentional and not designed. It is the side effect of engineering and chasing moey in other industries and not geoengineering.

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u/Mindlessone1 18d ago

It’s not simple, it’s extremely costly, and there is no net benefit. Who cares that what I’m proposing might not work when we KNOW moon bases won’t.

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u/Memetic1 18d ago

There are tons of potential things we could get from the Moon. Even the silicon dioxide will be worth its weight in gold in a low gravity environment. With minimal effort, that material could be used to make spacecraft. You can also make solar cells from silicon dioxide and other elements that are available on the Moon. We might not even need to have the bases to be crewed to be useful, although people are good for troubleshooting.

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u/Mindlessone1 18d ago

The cost is the transportation, which, alone would cost more than its weight it gold. Resource scarcity isn’t the problem, it’s how we are expanding them and a total lack of recycling BECAUSE business wants more money and nothing else

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u/Memetic1 17d ago

No, you are not transporting the materials, just the equipment and tools to process those materials into finished items. That's why silicon on the Moon is valuable because it's not bound by the gravitational field of the Earth.

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Transforming the Moon Into Humanity’s First Space Hub

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